{"id":12568,"date":"2018-04-10T20:34:43","date_gmt":"2018-04-11T00:34:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.commoncause.org\/articles\/a-political-stunt-nothing-more\/"},"modified":"2018-04-10T20:34:43","modified_gmt":"2018-04-11T00:34:43","slug":"isang-political-stunt-wala-nang-iba-pa","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.commoncause.org\/tl\/articles\/a-political-stunt-nothing-more\/","title":{"rendered":"Isang Political Stunt, Wala Nang Higit Pa"},"template":"","class_list":["post-12568","article","type-article","status-publish","hentry","article_type-blog-post"],"acf":{"details":{"summary":"","featured_image":null,"article_type":1103,"authors":["{\"site_id\":\"1\",\"post_type\":\"person\",\"post_id\":8577}"],"related_issues":[137,165,2082],"related_work":false,"location":null},"sidebar":{"helper_enable_sidebar":false,"helper_media_contact":{"heading":"Media Contact","manually_enter_person":false,"person":null,"name":"","role":"","phone":"","email":""},"helper_links_downloads":{"heading":"Links & Downloads","links":null}},"page_layout":[{"acf_fc_layout":"layout_wysiwyg","_acfe_flexible_toggle":null,"component_wysiwyg":{"content":"It\u2019s being obscured by the specter of a deepening war in Syria, invasions of privacy on Facebook, and turmoil at the White House over the Russia investigation and Stormy Daniels, but the House of Representatives is set to act this week on a bad idea that has been knocking around since the 1970s \u00ad\u2013 and whose time still has not come.\r\n\r\nBy Thursday, if not before, lawmakers are to vote on a proposed constitutional amendment requiring a balanced federal budget. With Republicans controlling the House, the amendment almost certainly will get a majority vote but will fall well short of the two-thirds margin it needs to advance.\r\n\r\nHad the balanced budget amendment been in place in 2008, when the housing market collapsed and the nation plunged into the Great Recession, Congress likely would have been unable to respond. Because they were unconstrained by a balanced budget requirement, lawmakers were able to pass a $787 billion stimulus program that launched the recovery that continued through the Obama administration.\r\n\r\nThis week\u2019s planned vote is a political gesture, nothing more, and in scheduling it now the House\u2019s Republican leaders are showing off a level of hypocrisy that is eye-popping even by Washington standards.\r\n\r\nThis Congress already has passed budget-busting and tax-cutting bills that will reduce the government\u2019s revenue by more than $1 trillion by 2020 while increasing military and domestic spending by $300 billion. Talk of balancing the budget against that backdrop is too much even for some GOP lawmakers, as well as for balanced budget advocates like industrialists and conservative mega-donors Charles and David Koch.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf lawmakers think they can use a balanced budget amendment as a fig leaf of fiscal responsibility after just voting for such an irresponsible spending bill, they should think again,\" Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, a major Koch-backed lobby and political action group, told\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/story\/news\/politics\/2018\/04\/08\/house-republicans-vote-balanced-budget-amendment-conservative-ire-spending\/493728002\/\"><strong>USA Ngayon<\/strong><\/a>. \"Congress had an opportunity to exercise fiscal discipline, and they blew it.\"\r\n\r\n\u201cRepublicans control the House, Senate and White House,\u201d Sen. Bob Corker, R-TN,\u00a0<strong><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/SenBobCorker\/status\/979395010792775681\">nagtweet<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0a few days before lawmakers began their Easter break. \u201cIf we were serious about balancing the budget, we would do it. But instead of doing the real work, some will push this symbolic measure so they can feel good when they go home to face voters.\u201d\r\n\r\nCorker is retiring from Congress at the end of the year, so he no longer has to fear the wrath of deficit-weary members of his party\u2019s base whom the amendment is designed to appease. He also happens to be absolutely correct.\r\n\r\nCommon Cause has opposed the amendment since the Carter administration and continues to do so.\r\n\r\nA March 1980 letter from then-Common Cause President David Cohen argued that the nation\u2019s charter is not the proper place to set fiscal policy and that the amendment \u201ccould become an economic straitjacket.\u201d The amendment\u2019s restrictions would simply drive Congress to move spending programs off-budget to hide deficit spending, Cohen added.\r\n\r\nSeventeen years after Cohen\u2019s letter, then-Common Cause President Ann McBride wrote that the amendment would make the U.S. Supreme Court a forum for resolving disputes over economic policy. And because the 1997 version of the amendment would have permitted Congress to adopt an unbalanced budget only with the approval of a three-fifths majority of its members, it would have given a congressional majority effective control of the budget, McBride argued.\r\n\r\nAll those arguments remain valid. If members of both parties truly are interested in a balanced budget they have the power to deliver one, as they did during the Clinton administration. They simply need to ratchet up their collective nerve to pass tax increases and\/or spending cuts that will make the government\u2019s income match its expenses.\r\n\r\n###"}}]},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v26.6 (Yoast SEO v27.1.1) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>A Political Stunt, Nothing More - Common Cause<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.commoncause.org\/tl\/mga-artikulo-2\/isang-political-stunt-wala-nang-iba-pa\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Political Stunt, Nothing More\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.commoncause.org\/tl\/mga-artikulo-2\/isang-political-stunt-wala-nang-iba-pa\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Common Cause\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/CommonCause\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.commoncause.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/CC-Share-Graphic-Main9.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1200\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"630\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@CommonCause\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.commoncause.org\/articles\/a-political-stunt-nothing-more\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.commoncause.org\/articles\/a-political-stunt-nothing-more\/\",\"name\":\"A Political Stunt, Nothing More - 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